Jostein Gaarder: The Castle in the Pyrenees

The Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder is best known for his book Sophie's World. It's been read all over the world in 55 language. There's also a movie, a musical, a board game and a CD-ROM. Sophie's World, which is an exploration of thought and philosophy, was the best-selling fiction book in the world in 1995.

But Jostein Gaarder has written many others: The Solitaire Mystery, The Christmas Mystery, Through a Glass Darkly, Vita Brevis, The Ringmaster's Daughter and The Orange Girl.

Some of them are written for young adults; others not and, like Sophie's World, the new book The Castle in the Pyrenees also deals with philosophical questions.

While Sophie's World might be read as a history of Western philosophy, The Castle in the Pyrenees might be described as a confrontation between science and belief. And it's a love story too. This is an edited version of a conversation with Jostein Gaarder and Ramona Koval recorded at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Welcome to The Book Show on ABC Radio National. Ramona Koval with you from the Melbourne Writers Festival, in conversation with a Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder. You'll know of course that his book, Sophie's World has been read all over the world in 55 languages and I read that there's now almost an industry based around that one book, including a movie, a musical, a board game and a CD-Rom. It was the best selling fiction book in the world in 1995, an astonishing achievement for what is a painless and entertaining course in philosophy in the form of a novel.

But Jostein has written many others: The Solitaire Mystery, The Christmas Mystery, Through a Glass Darkly, which was filmed, The Orange Girl, which was also filmed. Some of his books are written for young adults, others not, and like Sophie's World, the new book, The Castle in the Pyrenees is also what you might call philosophical. While Sophie's World might be read as a history of western philosophy, The Castle in the Pyrenees might be described as a confrontation between science and belief, and it's a love story too.

Here's an edited version of my conversation with Jostein Gaarder at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

[Applause]

Ramona Koval: Now, Jostein, this book begins in a most—I was going to say modern way, but it's probably postmodern way, with an email from a woman called Solrunn, who writes to Steinn.

They're former lovers, who meet again... some 30 years before this email is being sent, they met 30 years ago; they've just met again. By chance, it seems, they meet on a balcony of an old, wooden hotel, by a fjord in western Norway, and they decide to keep in touch with each other via a secret correspondence, even though they both have families and they live a long way apart.

Now, Jostein, you've written a novel in letters before, Sophie's World, and in fact I think The Orange Girl has a letter in it as well—this idea of people communicating through writing. Tell me what led you to this new form, this epistolary novel using an email.

Jostein Gaarder: Well, it's the modern way of writing letters, but it's of course very different. In a way, writing emails can be more of a dramatic way of sending letters. I mean, one letter can be one message, can be 'Why?' or 'No, I can't bear this anymore,' or, like, 'You make me angry.' So sometimes it can come down to more of a dramatic text. I mean, like a dialogue. But here, when I started to write this book, I actually had the title in my head, 'Epistles about the Occult'. So I was playing with this traditional letter-novel from the eighteenth century.

Ramona Koval: But the difference is, of course, that the pace of an email novel is going to be different from a novel about letters. Because with exchanges of letters, people wrote them and then they waited for the postman, maybe their views had changed by the time they got a response back; and now we expect instant response.

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, that's true and that is our modern way of living. I think it's... I don't like it. You may send an email and then you first have to answer whether you have opened the mail. I never do that. People shouldn't demand from me a kind of receipt when I open the mail, because then they can get very irritated five seconds or five days after, if I haven't answered, you know? And also it's fatal to write emails, because you push the button—'Send'—and you cannot recall it. Henrik Ibsen's play, A Doll's House, the whole thing is about a letter lying in the mailbox and at least it's possible, physically, to remove the mail: 'I regret. Don't read it,' or something like that.

Another thing which fascinates me is that the whole novel, this novel, is the content of a memory brick. It consists only of the letters between the two characters, except one last letter written by a third person. And so that [that] physical thing is the novel. I think also it's fascinating, that actually in this memory brick, this Flash memory brick, there [is] storage possible for 20,000 novels. So this is only a very small part...

Ramona Koval: One twenty-thousandth of the possibility...

Jostein Gaarder: For instance, in my cell phone here, I have all the speeches I have made, all the books I've read, all the encyclopaedia articles I want to bring with me—and I've found out that these 8GB, they can room 20,000 novels.

But when a person writes a letter to another person of course very much is implicit; that is the kind of art here, not to write things to each other that they obviously have the same memory about. Here very much is about memory, because the basic conflict in this story is that two people from [when] they were 19 years old they lived together in a very, very, very passionate love relationship, nothing could separate them, that would be absolutely impossible, nothing. But then one day—do you have that experience? An extraordinary experience. And they give such different explanations, interpretations that they simply cannot live together anymore. And that's what happens: they leave each other and they don't meet again before 30 years. At the same location.

Ramona Koval: At the same location, at the same time—incredibly. How could this happen? Is it an accident? Is it fated?

He's by now a climate change expert. And she... well, she's almost on another planet entirely. How might we describe the ideas of both parties? Are they in the same world at all?

Jostein Gaarder: I think they are, in a way, because she believes in natural science, in astrophysics and 'the Big Bang theory' and evolution of life on earth. So she's not what we could call a fundamentalist, but she is a spiritualist, she is deeply convinced that apart from being bodies, the very core of a human being is that we are spirits and that we will survive, these spirits will survive death.

I must confess that when I started to write the book, my intention was to write the book that was kind of very much standing on the man's grounds, like on reason and scientific ground. Towards all kinds of occultism and I would say neo-occultism—we have a lot of it in the world today, a great part of the population are actually communicating with angels, such as a princess in our royal family...

Ramona Koval: But you write about angels too and you always have written about angels.

Jostein Gaarder: I do. And that is in the book Through a Glass Darkly, and that is a kind of a summit between heaven and earth together with this angel.

Ramona Koval: So is this book really an argument that you have with yourself?

Jostein Gaarder: It became. Because when I started to write it, I should write a book that was like an argument against all this...

Ramona Koval: Irrationality?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes. But I had to save this woman. I had to make her childhood. And the more I hate her—this is really true—the more I had to listen to her.

And today I have no problem at all to understand that it's possible to believe that these bodies are transient, you know, but actually, in a Platonic way, our spirits are made of something completely different. So it became, yes, it became an argument within my own mind. Still I would say that I'm absolutely more related to Steinn, but I have at least a deeper understanding. And the word 'belief' means slightly different things, because we ask, for instance, 'Do you think it will be sunny tomorrow?' Well, actually I do, because I saw the weather forecast and I can even look at the sky and say, 'I believe...,' which means I think it's probable that it will be sunny.

Now I can question, 'Do I believe in an existence for my soul after death?' My answer is, 'No, I don't think that's probable,' so I don't believe that. But I may be wrong.

Ramona Koval: But you know it was interesting... I actually found her rather annoying, because I'm a much more kind of scientific-based person, with that sort of an approach, and I found her very self-regarding and rather self-satisfied. And she kept saying to him—when they'd have conversations and he would explain something—and she'd say, 'Yet again I get a materialistic thesis!'

But I wondered whether you thought what might happen if you reversed the roles: a female rational thinker and a female non-believer, and a male believer in spiritual things. Do you think it would have worked?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, definitely. I can say definitely because I've written such a book. I wrote the book called Vita Brevis, which is also in letters, because St Augustine—now, this is history—St Augustine wrote 400 years after Christ; he wrote his Confessions. It was like 10 letters, 10 chapters. And he confessed all his sins to God. He's telling them also, like he lived together with a woman for 12 years, he loved the woman, he was desperately in love with her, he got a son with her, called Adeodatus (ironically, it's 'given by God'), and then he is more and more becoming a dualist; he is more and more convinced that to live physically together with a woman can prevent the salvation of his soul. So what does he do? He is sending the girl back home to Carthago, in North Africa, and he says that 'it split my heart; it was bleeding,' and he was really... But he did this sacrifice to save his soul! And what about her soul?

But then I wrote the book. But in strolling around in Buenos Aires, at a flea market where they were selling old books, I found an old parchment, you know, and I can read Latin, Latin's really... and I immediately understood this is this woman's—I call her Floria—her answer. And she is blaming Augustine for his religious fanaticism, and she is the practical kind of old type of Roman girl.

And I have got so many letters from, even from Augustine experts, who are asking me to have a photocopy of the parchment, or the question, 'Did you really find this?' Because I have a lot of footnotes commenting my translation from Latin. So often, what I mean, I'm not saying that women are more religious fanatics. Osama bin Laden is a man, and I mean I think that a lot of the religious fanaticism has been found more among men, actually.

Ramona Koval: You studied theology I understand.

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, well, not exactly. I studied the science of religions.

Ramona Koval: The science of religions?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, you know, and history of religions.

Ramona Koval: Yeah? The science of religions? What sort of science is that?

Jostein Gaarder: It's a really a science.

Ramona Koval: What's the experimental basis for the science of religion?

Jostein Gaarder: Well, for instance, it is sociology of religion—we can start here.

Ramona Koval: I think we still haven't got to science.

Jostein Gaarder: Well, and also it is—do you call psychology a science?

Ramona Koval: Some.

Jostein Gaarder: Yeah, so the psychology of religion, you know?

Ramona Koval: So were you religious or were you just curious?

Jostein Gaarder: I was scientifically interested, yes. [Laughter]

Ramona Koval: Did you have any belief at all. In angels maybe?

Jostein Gaarder: No. I was in Sunday School when I was a child, but no. My mother was a Sunday School teacher and she didn't believe in angels either.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, all of a sudden I woke up and I realised that I was part of a mystery, an enigma. And I went to my mother, to my teachers, and I said, 'Don't you think it's strange that the world exists, that we exist, that I exist? Isn't it weird?' And the answer was, 'Well, not really.' You know, this was in the very beginning of the sixties and the world was supposed to be normal, but I stood my ground and that is the background for studying philosophy, for studying the history of religions, and definitely for becoming an author.

Ramona Koval: You went through being a teacher first?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, but that was after studying these subjects at university. So I was teaching philosophy for 10 years. And then when I wrote the book called The Solitaire Mystery—which was my breakthrough at home in Norway and still I think is perhaps one of my best books—then I understood maybe I will now become a full-time writer. And that was partly the reason why I wrote Sophie's World. I couldn't just leave all these interesting processes in the classroom with the students, or I couldn't just turn my neck to it, I had to write the book first. So I told my wife, 'I'm now writing a real odd book, for very, very few readers. It's a novel about the history of philosophy and we will have no real income from that book,' I think I said. And she said, 'So write it quickly then.' [Laughter]

Ramona Koval: And did you write it quickly?

Jostein Gaarder: I did it in three months, because we had two boys. And even my publishing house, you know, after the great success of The Solitaire Mystery, they hesitated to publish it. And I went there and finally [they] said, 'OK, we'll make it.' Then I expressed my gratitude for such a non-commercial publication for cultural reasons.

But it became the absolute most commercial book ever written in Norway.

Ramona Koval: But did it surprise you that there was such a thirst for philosophy?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes. It was written in 1990. Imagine. It is the year when the whole Eastern Europe is changing—the year of Perestroika, the Berlin Wall is falling. And at the same time I think I experienced myself that the church lost in that period a lot of influence on people's minds. I mean especially the Roman Catholic Church. I saw that process very clearly in Italy, in Spain. I think maybe it's part of the reason.

But there is another, and that is obvious. I started to write that book as a manual, a text book. So I wrote [in pompous voice], 'Human beings have always asked philosophical questions...' I wrote 30 pages and gave up.

Ramona Koval: Because you bored yourself?

Jostein Gaarder: Absolutely! And it would be very boring. But then I had the idea to conceive a story about a girl coming home from school, opening the mailbox, and she is receiving two questions: 'Who are you?' and 'Where does the world come from?' And the philosophist I had after being a teacher... complete year, I didn't open books at all, and the story it just... that's why I wrote it in so short [a] time, too.

So, it became a novel, even a novel about the history of philosophy for young adults. You may say it could fall between all stools, but it fell on all of them. And a lot of people I think have thought that philosophy sounds fascinating, interesting, but too academic, too difficult, too boring. This became a chance also for people at our age to repeat what we didn't study carefully enough when we were at universities.

Ramona Koval: Before an audience at the Melbourne Writers Festival, Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder with me, Ramona Koval for The Book Show.

Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into 55 languages. His latest book, The Castle in the Pyrenees also explores philosophy, but asks the questions, can two people who knew and loved one another in their twenties, who separate and then meet again years later, find that love again and live together even though they've entirely different understandings of the world? One has a rational belief in science and the other strongly believes in fate and spirits.

Jostein Gaarder: I think that if I have a message in the book, which is my view, it is that I think it should be possible to live together. But here part of the conflict is that they—the two of them—19, 20, 21 years old, young people, they felt they had their own religion, they were ecstatic agnostics, that's why they had a poster of this painting by Magritte called the The Castle in the Pyrenees, which is a huge rock with a castle at the top of the rock; it's floating in the air, in space.

Ramona Koval: And there's a sea underneath it.

Jostein Gaarder: And the sea, exactly. And with this of course impossible... but isn't the world impossible? And this ecstatic way of living, living together, experiencing life. And then all of a sudden the woman is even convinced that she has seen a ghost. And it is he in the story that is getting irritated.

Ramona Koval: She finds a book and she becomes obsessed with this book.

Jostein Gaarder: She found a book, a classic book, by a man called Kardec, Allan Kardec, which actually started Spiritism as a religion in Europe.

Ramona Koval: What's in that book?

Jostein Gaarder: It is a book where no word is written by a human being. All texts in the book are, they're dead spirits, the spirits, kind of a...

Ramona Koval: Dictation?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes. And they are revealing truths from the other side. So, we talk about... a keyword for me is the word 'revelation'. That book is definitely a revelation. And also if—as in this story—if you see a dead person—it's called in parapsychology an 'apparition'—if you see such a person, it's a revelation. In most religions, it's based on revelations. I mean, Islam is based on the angel Gabriel who speaks the Qur'an into the ear of the Prophet. And God is of course revealing himself for Moses at Mount Sinai.

So, I think it's possible to believe very many things—even to believe in a life after death—without believing in revelations. I, as you understand, I have perhaps no beliefs in any revelations, but (as we are able to in my country) just leave the town and go out in the open nature and when I look at the sky and I also know what the sky is—I mean, all these billions of light years between the stars—then I may absolutely have a religious experience. So, I believe in religion without revelation. And I think many of us can have religious feelings without the belief in revelation.

Then, also, if I am in a Muslim country and people ask me, 'Are you a Christian?' then I say, 'Yes.'

Ramona Koval: Why?

Jostein Gaarder: Because I need no other real moral teacher or guidance in my life than Jesus. I mean, really, the preachings by Jesus [are] my ethics—not only mine; it's built into our laws.

Ramona Koval: So Jesus as a teacher, as a philosopher, but not a God?'

Jostein Gaarder: Yeah, I don't believe as the church believes that Jesus—you know, that is what she doesn't believe either—that Jesus died and then the body was alive again. That is what St Paul is saying, that this is the proof for our own destiny. I mean, the own archaic images is that at the Doomsday, God will open the graves and give life again. Because the early Christians, they believed that Jesus would come back.

But I think that I am not emphasising sufficiently the love story here.

Jostein Gaarder: They understand by exchanging these emails that they have lived together for all these 30 years, although not physically. Very closely they have lived. They have been talking to each other kind of.

Ramona Koval: But without contact.

Jostein Gaarder: With no contact. So, as he says to her, 'I must just say thank you also for these 30 years.' When they meet again a kind of fatal process is starting, because now things start to happen in the real world. And I shall not reveal the very end of that, but I wouldn't hesitate to call this book, The Castle in the Pyrenees, an erotic tragedy. [Laughter]

Ramona Koval: Can I say, why has this got... these are lingonberries, are they? Or cherries? On the front, on the title. 'Cos the Norwegian version has got The Castle in the Pyrenees on it.

Jostein Gaarder: I don't really understand why there are cherries there. [Laughter] And in the end, when she is sitting out at the seafront, typing, with a long... what do you call this?

Ramona Koval: A cord.

Jostein Gaarder: ...yep, cord to the house, writing to him, she is eating cherries. So, that is... And her husband, who is jealous, I think, about her writing...

Ramona Koval: Yeah, suspicious.

Jostein Gaarder: He is also coming and having some cherries. But I think that when they made it two cherries it is to try to present the book as a love story. This cover, it's a cover saying that this is a book for females! [Laughter] It's not! It's definitely... for instance, he is sitting, travelling with a train and bus all through Norway, crossing the mountain range, and this physicist is rethinking, he's remembering and telling the reader the whole, entire history of this universe since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years from now.

Ramona Koval: It's a long bus trip.

Jostein Gaarder: It's a long bus trip. [Laughter] And it's not a very feminine bus trip.

Ramona Koval: Oh, it's very, very masculine, the bus trip.

You used the word fate before, and the question about whether these people were fated to meet,or whether they're end is fated. And I mean I can't believe you believe in fate, because I also know that you're an activist for people to understand climate change. And if you believe that fate holds everything in its hand, why would you try to change anything about the way we're going?

Jostein Gaarder: When they started mailing each other, apart from a lot of hints to their old love story and so on, is whether it was a coincidence, if it was random that they just met at that... She's convinced it was no coincidence; but he is a rational, scientific-orientated person, so he is convinced it is a coincidence. So of course if you believe in fate, you also believe in these coincidences, you know? I myself... again the word 'believe' means what I think is most probable. I have experienced so many strange coincidences in my life that I could tip over and really believe in some kind of guidance by fate.

Ramona Koval: But couldn't you then believe the fact that the world is warming up and it's looking tragic is fate, so why worry? Somebody else is looking after it.

Jostein Gaarder: I am completely convinced that there is no fate behind the global warming. I think it's absolutely an expression of human blindness or of lack of ability to work together. We know that all the nations in the universe, all the nations, will cooperate, 100 per cent well, in the future. If not, it's the ruin of our civilisation. So it's that serious. What fascinates me is I know that also in Australia you have a lot of climate scepticism, but for me it's very, very, very simple chemistry: on this planet there are huge amounts of oil reserves—millions of years old—and coal and gas. And of course forests also are keeping carbon. Now what we started to do during the industrial revolution was that we started to burn all these resources of fuel—we oxidised it. So carbon became carbon plus oxygen; carbon became carbon dioxide. And the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide is that carbon cannot fly, but carbon dioxide can fly, causing of course an increasing greenhouse effect. There is a man from Melbourne who has actually written a very good introduction to this, called Tim Flannery. And we do know that at the beginning of the industrial revolution it was 275 so-called parts per million, particles of carbon dioxide; it has then increased, increased, increased, increased, until today, 387 parts per million; next year, 289; next year, 291; and this just will go on and go on and go on. Until (I'm an optimist) we will break out of this regime—I'm convinced we will—and for me there is no alternative to be optimist.

Ramona Koval: You talked about the Declaration of Human Rights being the sum total of, I suppose, western civilisation's idea about what is a human being and what we owe each other; but you're saying now that we really need to get together and have another kind of declaration?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes, because I think that maybe the most important achievement of philosophy, actually, or literature, of human intellect were this universal declaration or human rights from 1948. And of course they are extremely important. And still today human rights are violated in many places. We have to fight for them. But we cannot anymore only focus on human rights; we must focus on human responsibilities. So time is perhaps right for a new, the growth of a new universal declaration, a universal declaration of human obligations. And in a way, that is a process that started from its first beginning in Kyoto. And it was very disappointing we didn't go any further in Copenhagen, but we know that this process will go on.

This is a writers' festival and what is a writers' festival? What is literature? It's a celebration of human consciousness. For seven days writers [will] be in the forefront as vanguards to defend human consciousness from being annihilated.

Ramona Koval: Is that why you write?

Jostein Gaarder: No, but I think I have a responsibility. Who [was] saving and defending human rights? Of course many people, but very many authors. Like Voltaire—he had to escape from France and go to England. And it was seen through the dictatorship in the Soviet Union, for instance—you know, Solzhenitsyn. Writers were protecting the freedom of speech. And I think maybe this planet is the only place in the entire universe where we have this universal consciousness, this consciousness about this enigmatic, huge universe. Then it's not only a global responsibility to preserve life conditions on earth, it's a cosmic responsibility.

I'll just say one thing more to this. I meet environmentalists sometimes who are saying that Gaia, mother earth, for the time being is sick and that is because she has a fever. And we are the microbes, the small bacterias, that are causing Gaia's disease. But soon, very soon, Gaia will get rid of us and then she will be healthy again. No, I cannot accept that thought. I think it's a kind of eco-fascism, because I think this planet is very different with human beings on it, different than without. There is a lot of shit to say about human behaviour, but it's ambiguous—we are extraordinary.

Ramona Koval: Because we try and understand what we're here for?

Jostein Gaarder: Yes. Isn't it amazing that, I mean, the last hundred years, let's start 1905—that was Einstein's theory of relativism; in the 20s, 30s, Hubble—he discovered that Andromeda, it's not a star, it's a galaxy, and that the galaxies are expanding, expanding universe; in 1953, Crick and Watson gave a detailed description of the DNA molecule, now we know the human genome.

Ramona Koval: Are you going to be sad that in 500 years you'll be dead and you won't know what there is to know?

Jostein Gaarder: I talked with a very, very distinguished and very old Norwegian philosopher. He was maybe, when I had a talk with him, he was 85. It was about 12 years before he died. And we talked about this, and I asked him how he felt growing old. 'Oh, yeah, I would like to live 20 or 30 more years to have more understanding, but we will never understand it all. The more we understand, the more questions.' I mean, if our human brain was so simply constructed that we could completely understand it, then we would have been so stupid that we wouldn't understand it anyway. [Laughter and applause]

Ramona Koval: Jostein Gaarder in conversation with me, Ramona Koval, at the Melbourne Writers Festival. His latest book, The Castle in the Pyrenees is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, distributed in Australia by Hachette. And he's written many others besides his bestselling Sophie's World.